WASHINGTON — Not a single seat was empty in the East Room of the White House on Thursday during a conference, organized by President Obama, on the dangers of sports-related concussions.

There were scientists and doctors and representatives from professional sports leagues like the N.F.L. and Major League Soccer. The N.C.A.A. president, Mark Emmert, and the Giants co-owner Steve Tisch were among those escorted to their seats. Nearby sat members of Congress and Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, a former West Point pitcher who now runs the United States Army.

This wasn’t the N.F.L. putting out a news release; this was shoving the issue of concussions into the public conversation on the biggest stage possible. Tens of millions of dollars were pledged by private and public institutions for research and education regarding head injuries in sports.

But after years of the N.F.L.’s obscuring the seriousness of concussions from its players — so much so that many thought the league got a bargain when it agreed to a $765 million-plus lawsuit brought by 4,500 former players — is the public supposed to stand up and cheer?

Watching all the pomp, it was hard to ignore that an event billed to be a huge advance in concussion research was actually heartbreaking. Where were all of these people and entities 20 years ago, when the N.F.L. formed its first committee on mild traumatic brain injuries — the main subject of the conference?

Where were they when Troy Aikman was knocked out during a game and later couldn’t even remember playing in it? Or when Merrill Hoge was forced to retire after learning that another concussion might kill him? Or when the former N.F.L. commissioner Paul Tagliabue called concussions “a pack journalism issue”?

Back then, didn’t anyone powerful realize that someone besides the N.F.L. — which perennially was studying the issue, while more players had their “bell rung” — should look into this? I guess not. The organization that made billions from players hitting each other was left to determine, on its own, if the way its game was played was causing permanent damage to its players. Now it’s obvious that no one should have ever trusted the league to examine the safety of its own moneymaker.

Now concussions are a national issue, apparently out of selfishness. It’s not the N.F.L. people care about — it’s their own children who got everyone thinking something monumental must be done about head injuries in sports.

White House officials said that Obama and Jay Carney, his press secretary, were talking about their children and concussions one day when they came up with the idea for the conference. Jennifer Palmieri, the White House communications director, said the president was “concerned about the safety of his own daughters,” who play sports.

Tisch, the Giants co-owner, said that at nearly the same time he was deciding to donate $10 million to the neurosurgery department at the David Geffen School of Medicine at U.C.L.A. He said he was doing so because he wanted to protect children from concussions. Tisch told me Wednesday night that U.C.L.A.’s program and Obama’s initiative address “many concerns that parents of kids who play contact sports share with me.”

His donation came after years of his family’s involvement in pro football, a sport in which concussions have been a problem for decades. Today, though, Tisch has a son who plays wide receiver in high school and a daughter who plays lacrosse. Concussions, it seems, have become a big deal to him now that they could happen to his own children — and not just to the men he has been paying to knock opponents off their feet with the force of a steam engine.

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The president, representatives of professional sports leagues and young athletes at a White House summit called for more robust research into youth concussions.Published OnMay 29, 2014CreditImage by Gabriella Demczuk/The New York Times

Now U.C.L.A.’s BrainSport Program, which is involved in research, treatment and education regarding sports-related concussions, will be named after Tisch, which is all good and wonderful until you realize that he and so many others in football should have been proactive about the issue long ago.

But at least Tisch is doing something. That can’t necessarily be said for the owners of the other 31 teams. Then again, it might be stomach-turning to see a hospital wing in every N.F.L. city named after an owner. The Jerry Jones Brain Study Center? The Bob Kraft Center for the Treatment of Concussions?

Maybe every one of their former players with brain-related injuries could get discounts there. Or maybe not; that might not leave room for anyone else.

To the league’s owners and to many fans, the players are just commodities. If they weren’t, this conference would have happened years ago.

It makes no moral sense to worry about the safety of your own little soccer player or tiny left tackle when on weekends, you still put on your jersey, plop down on your couch and watch players clean each other’s clocks for hours at a time. But the N.F.L. isn’t the hero of any morality tale.

When I asked Tisch when he became aware of the concussion problem in the N.F.L., he said, “I think full ownership was made aware of these problems, and players coming forward, I think it goes back four or five years.”

That seems about 20 years too late, given that the N.F.L. formed its first committee on concussions in 1994. By then, countless players were battling brain injuries, among them Hall of Famers like Mike Webster, Harry Carson and Rayfield Wright, a former Dallas Cowboys tackle I interviewed this year.

Obama briefly characterized N.F.L. players like them as “grown men who choose to accept some risk to play a game that they love and that they excel at,” making a distinction between those players and children who play sports.

But to talk to Wright, who is 68 and is coping with worsening dementia, is to realize that he did not know the risks of the game when he played. He said that if he knew that his multiple concussions would lead to headaches, irritability and seizures — or even blacking out when driving or forgetting why he started boiling water on the stove — he would have stuck with basketball.

But the problem was that he didn’t know. There was no one to save him from himself. When looking over his medical records from his playing years, I didn’t find one entry that mentioned a head injury or concussion, even though Wright was knocked cold several times during his career.

So it’s all well and good that saving young athletes from concussions is now so important that even the White House has put it on its to-do list. But for the N.F.L. players who came before — or even those playing now — the future probably isn’t as promising. Some who suffered brain trauma may face dementia, Parkinson’s or other neurological-related problems. During Thursday’s discussion it was almost as if those men had been forgotten.

That’s why the White House conference, though a big step in the fight for concussion awareness, still had a dark cloud looming above it.